I noticed how people tend to vastly underestimate a topic's complexity too, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like a constant buzzkill when hanging out with people, and I do my best to hide it, but most of the time I end up thinking about how incomplete our conversation is, and how therefore useless/wasteful it is.
In my more charitable moments, I think that it's good mental exercise, but it's hard to think generously about someone else when you hear them say superficial "I could do better" statements like the topic of this article. How could they be so naïve, to think that they can, casually, upend an entire field? It happens on Reddit (and HN) all the time, too. Every community centered around a creative work is lousy with, "Why didn't they just" style arguments.
Also, not for nothing, but I've never heard the "building an airplane while flying it" analogy used to suggest software is harder than building an airplane. Pardon my cursing, but who the fuck thinks programming is harder than aerospace engineering???
Finally, I found this super duper hard to read all the way through, due to the lack of formatting. I'm assuming that decision is somehow intentional, but it's not a kind one. My eyes hurt. :(
My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
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I noticed how people tend to vastly underestimate a topic's complexity too, but I'm not sure what to do with it. I feel like a constant buzzkill when hanging out with people, and I do my best to hide it, but most of the time I end up thinking about how incomplete our conversation is, and how therefore useless/wasteful it is.
In my more charitable moments, I think that it's good mental exercise, but it's hard to think generously about someone else when you hear them say superficial "I could do better" statements like the topic of this article. How could they be so naïve, to think that they can, casually, upend an entire field? It happens on Reddit (and HN) all the time, too. Every community centered around a creative work is lousy with, "Why didn't they just" style arguments.
Also, not for nothing, but I've never heard the "building an airplane while flying it" analogy used to suggest software is harder than building an airplane. Pardon my cursing, but who the fuck thinks programming is harder than aerospace engineering???
Finally, I found this super duper hard to read all the way through, due to the lack of formatting. I'm assuming that decision is somehow intentional, but it's not a kind one. My eyes hurt. :(
My suggestion here would be to think about the purpose of the conversation. The goal of cocktail party conversations is not to create working solutions to real world engineering problems. It is to create connections between people, and to have fun. Speculative but uninformed discussions about hard problems are indeed useful if they fulfil this goal. Let's face it, if all the "amateurs" in the room had enough insight to produce workable solutions, it would still be a "useless" conversation on a practical level because those people, working in unrelated fields, do not have the means or the opportunity to put their theories into practice.
Oh I enjoy bullshitting as much as the next person, I get bothered mostly when people genuinely don't think that's what we're doing.
But yeah, I'm able to mostly suppress this feeling and live my life, but it's really annoying, to me, when people take themselves too seriously.